This shame is based in my personal, and particular, experience with patriarchy and my understanding of feminism, and it’s real, but it’s dawned on me in the meantime that it might have been useful to note that I don’t exactly live my life soaked in shame or guilt. I have moments. The third and fourth things on the list plague me to a greater or lesser degree fairly regularly, but I don’t walk around in a morass of self-loathing. Mostly, on most days, I’m pretty ok with myself.

But if I think about it, expressing shame or guilt — while honest and I think even important (we can’t deal with something until we admit to ourselves that it’s a problem. Hello, daughter of the 12 Step Programs here!) — is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it’s kind of part-and-parcel of the Judeo-Christian (I cannot believe I just used that term) worldview, and — even more problematically — part-and-parcel of Western social norms and mores for women. We talk about what we’re doing wrong all the time, frankly.

What would be revolutionary, perhaps, would be to talk about what we do right.

This came to me yesterday after wandering around at Eat The Damn Cake, through the posts of ETDC blogger Kate & her guest blogger, Anna. Kate has a regular feature at the end of each post that she calls an “Unroast”; in each one, she expresses love for some part of her body or appearance. Recently this has included “Today I love the way I look in baggy shirts” and “Today I love my ankles. They’re an almost exact combination of my parents’ ankles,” both examples indicating a certain looseness and creativity to the idea which I love.

The attitude behind the Unroast (and, frankly, the attitude behind the blog’s name) leads me to visit Eat The Damn Cake frequently. I have even written in response to Kate’s work in the past, but yesterday, it was guest blogger Anna’s posts that really grabbed me.

Anna was veryvery pregnant as she wrote the posts in question, grappling with the reality of moving as a veryvery pregnant person through the world, and these are the two bits that made we want to go out in search of her to ask her to be my lawful wedded wife. The first is from We are already normal (a very pregnant post), the second from We owe it to little girls (emphasis Anna’s):

Our attitudes influence more than just ourselves. If we’re going to change our body culture, we have to change our habits. Even those that are socially reinforced, even those that can be pleasant and bonding, as negative body talk so often can be.

And finally, we get to my point (which I swear, I have):

If I’m going to speak publicly about my feelings of shame, I should also choose to take the rather more revolutionary step of tooting my own horn. And thus, hereunder you will find a list of things about me in which I find pleasure, and even, occasionally, pride.

1. I have genuinely taken on-board the notion that if an article of clothing doesn’t work on my body, the problem is not my body, but the article of clothing. This seems small at first glance, but I think it’s actually kind of big. That moment, that moment when you stand in front of a mirror trying to take some piece of clothing (that you have been assured is gorgeous and all-the-rage) and make it look “right” on your own body and it’s.just.not.working — that moment is a moment of such deep intimacy with ourselves, a moment in which it is perilously easy to further swallow the lie that all bodies must look like one kind of body in order to be worthy, a moment in which it is so easy to get angry with our very flesh — it took me more than 40 years, but I have finally reached the point that when I start to hear those voices, I tell them to shut the fuck up, and I mean it. And I’m proud of myself, because it wasn’t easy.

2. I regularly contribute to the social dialogue about women’s rights, women’s bodies, and the fact that — given that we make up half the world — these are not “women’s issues” but human issues. In fact, there are days when I act like this is a job. I’m not particularly aggressive in my approach (often leading with versions of “I see why you’re saying that, but…”), but I am dogged. I write, I tweet, I confront, I question. I am part of the process by which society is undoing its assumptions about rape, women’s autonomy, our reproductive rights, and the essential human right of all people to make their own choices and live their lives precisely as who they are.

3. I am raising my children to be aware, thinking feminists. Our family talks all the time — at the dinner table, in the car, while watching TV — about how the world treats people, what society’s expectations are, and whether or not those expectations are fair or just or even reflective of the reality that we see around us — and the husband and I see the fruits of this labor all the time.

For instance #1: The girl recently complained that a very cool construction toy she’d gotten for her 8th birthday had no pictures of girls on the box, and when she found one on the instructions, she noted, with sarcasm positively dripping from her voice, that the model had built a princess crown “because all girls ever do are princess things.” For instance #2: The boy prepared this speech in honor of Martin Luther King last year for school (when he was all of 11), writing: “I have a dream that one day no one in this world will be able to push you down, regardless of any stereotypes. I have a dream that in all 50 states Muslim Boys and Muslim Girls and homosexual boys and homosexual girls and rich boys and rich girls and poor boys and poor girls and all of the boys and girls of America will join together and nothing in the world will be able to stop them.”

It matters that our girls and boys grow up to be feminist adults, but it also matters that they be feminist children. We need only look at schoolyard bullies to see the impact that children can have on people’s lives — loving, caring, egalitarian-minded children can help heal the world. And of course as their parents, it matters very deeply to us that the boy and the girl gain the tools they’ll need to shake off the world’s damaging messages. I am proud of the way that I am raising my children.

4. And finally, in the spirit of the Unroast: I love my hair. It’s long, of a vaguely once-was-blonde-now-is-brown color, streaked with bits of silver here and there and now that I’ve stopped using shampoos with Sodium Lauryl Sulfate has returned to the kind of softness and luster it had for almost all my life. It feels like a crown on my head, particularly when I wear it loose, and I love the way that makes me feel.

15 Responses

I think we’ve all been conditioned to see fault within ourselves. This is more true with women than men, in my opinion, but in a consumer society, we’re taught to believe that something is wrong with us. Once we take that into account, we then should buy something to ensure that nothing is wrong with us. And that contentment lasts for a little while until the same ploy is used again.

I love this, and I especially love that out of all your ‘stuff’ only one of them was related to the physical. It’s great to love your physical self, but too often when asked to list their positive traits, women tend towards the ‘well, I have nice eyes’ type of thing. I want to write a post like this now.

I like this a lot, especially points two and three. As someone who doesn’t have children — or, really, children in her life at all — I don’t think of myself as having much of influence, but I’ve been able to carve out a small piece of the internet to promote music made by women, or talk about the sexism that permeates pop culture. Maybe it’s a small contribution, but it’s my small contribution.

I love a happy feminist post. This set the tone for my day perfectly! And woah! Your kids are so awesome!
In regards to #2, I think it’s imperative that feminism works alongside other activist issues, such as homophobia and racism. I think it would be appropriate to bellow All For One and One For All here, right?

Kathy:
I like this a lot, especially points two and three. As someone who doesn’t have children — or, really, children in her life at all — I don’t think of myself as having much of influence, but I’ve been able to carve out a small piece of the internet to promote music made by women, or talk about the sexism that permeates pop culture. Maybe it’s a small contribution, but it’s my small contribution.

I would also say: Never underestimate the impact you have on those around you. When people — grown ups or children — see you moving through the world in a certain way, that matters. You never know what someone else is taking away, and which little girl will see your behavior and think “Right. So I can do that?”

As my sister once said: When we live our lives right, we help heal the world.

Camilla Peffer @ Girls Are Made From Pepsi:
I love a happy feminist post. This set the tone for my day perfectly! And woah! Your kids are so awesome!
In regards to #2, I think it’s imperative that feminism works alongside other activist issues, such as homophobia and racism. I think it would be appropriate to bellow All For One and One For All here, right?

I’m with you, sister — on both the “your kids are so awesome” front (!) and All For One and One For All!

Thank you for this follow-up. :) I was just thinking today how very much I love my feet, my hairy, calloused, scabby, crinkly, strong feet, for all that they represent to me my freedom and self-sufficiency. They might not be everyone’s idea of lovely, but they’re mine.

Jadey:
Thank you for this follow-up. :) I was just thinking today how very much I love my feet, my hairy, calloused, scabby, crinkly, strong feet, for all that they represent to me my freedom and self-sufficiency. They might not be everyone’s idea of lovely, but they’re mine.

There you go! Hobbit feet, FTW!

And on most days, I actually kind of love my belly scars, come to that.

One — up and down my middle, like a fine-toothed zipper — is a talisman of my saved life, the others — like two smiles on top of each other, at the zipper’s bottom — are the portal through which my babies emerged. It’s hard to feel too much ill-will toward any of them (except when they itch).

Emily, I love this post. So often as women and mothers and (Comrade Kevin points out) consumers, we’re taught to think about ways that we fail or don’t measure up to some mark. While none of us are perfect, it’s wonderful to hear women say, “This is something I’m good at. This is something I am proud of it.” In the spirit of things,
1) I am tenacious. Bulldog-style. Because I am tenacious, I have been able to do all kinds of things from the mundane (home repairs: “Oh, no, you motherf*ckin pipes, you will not defeat me.”) to the awesome (climbing Angel’s Landing in Zion Nat’l Park while 3 months pregnant).
2) I am good at feeding people. Few things bring me more pleasure.
3) I have a fabulous (big) butt.

About #1. I can relate, I bought a shirt from Hot Topic, then when I went home to try it on it didn’t fit at all. It was designed to be really body hugging, and I felt myself feeling that same sense of insecurity I had in high school when I would buy something that didn’t fit. So I decided, I will not go back there, I’ll return the shirt and I’ll get over it eventually.

Later on I was joking, since it was an Adventure Time shirt with the Lumpy Space Princess on it, that maybe it was designed to make the wearer appear as a Lumpy Space citizen.

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